“Who was that?” she asks, taking it from him.

As she looks over the curling, fanciful print, Gideon encounters another problem: it’s not that she can’t read it, exactly, but her ability to read has become somewhat hypothetical. She gets through a few items — like tomato bisque, which don’t even look like real words — before her eyes glaze over and meander pointless over the page. She blinks, shakes the menu once.

“Yeah, sure. That sounds fine — holy shit, is this real paper?”